Hey, you don’t see this every day: a company ditches its corporate master to be all chill on its own. Congrats, Last.fm. Last.fm is still the greatest music-related social networking site I’ve come across.
Covered, brilliantly (Jesse Walker is an alt radio guy himself), in Reason magazine here and Idolator here, the Performance Rights Act is a massive scam that’ll screw over hosts of musicians.
See, the idea is that radio stations should be happy, under this bogus Performance Rights Act, to pay copyright owners and the occasional performer (if you’re lucky enough to retain your copyright) extra cash for giving their music promotion and rotation.
And since this blog often covers things of an independent and punk variety, it only makes sense to talk about how this impacts indie labels. As Mr. Walker points out:
Ah, you say, but what about the independent artists who don’t get big promotional pushes from the major music labels? Surely they’d benefit from a new revenue stream? Actually, they’ll be even worse off. The economic mission of most commercial radio stations is to deliver audiences to the sponsors whose spots are aired between tunes. So programmers have a built-in preference for music whose mass appeal has already been proven. If you increase the cost of playing a record, that just intensifies the incentive: The more you pay to play a song, the more conservative you’ll be about which songs you play. The marginal cost of playing each track is the same, but the commercial payoff is greater for established artists.
Indie bands didn’t get helped by song-writer bonuses. They don’t even get airplay, realistically. Yeah, we can talk about Tegan and Sara bullshit, but actual indie bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat are not going to get much radio play. So this is yet another attempt at a giveaway to major labels and their minions. Hooray!
I don’t think I need to do more than quote the man: “I ain’t shoot nobody in like… since the early 90s, man.”
Here the Horrors (whose latest album I couldn’t sit through, so maybe he has a point about Myspace’s existence being some sort of general contagion upon music) explain exactly why music today sucks (it may be because they never learned about causality fallacies):
“I’m going to destroy [
Radiohead] the internet,” he told the Independent. “Every social network site, every blog. No-one’s happier now because of it. It’s really interesting that now we have complete communication, we have less good underground bands. How is that?”
I think the last time I heard this logic, it was supporting the well-known fact that aliens built the pyramids and that drinking some lemon tea jive will cure your cancer.
But, later in the article, the Horrors actually make me like them, when another one of their members says something along the lines of:
“I’m sick of reading about bands like The Killers,” he said. “I don’t believe in it for a second.”
What he doesn’t believe in, I’m not sure. God? Mr. Flowers? Lame ’00s alt-rock in general? But regardless, I fully support his statement because it sounds like the kind of nonsensical thing I might support stating.
So I agreed to go with my father to see Phish at Red Rocks Ampitheatre on either their Saturday or Sunday show. I figured I’d dragged him to enough concerts I wanted to see that I should go to one he wanted to see!
Now, he’d been unable to get pre-sale tickets as they’d sold out too fast. So I agreed to get on Ticketmaster’s website at noon today and order the general sale tickets as soon as they were available. Well, predictably, they all sold out within ten minutes.
So, what the fuck is up with this? For instance, you could buy REM’s tickets well after they were released to general sale. Snow Patrol and such too. Granted, they don’t have the cult following of Phish, but in looking around, what’s going on is that people are buying these tickets well in advance with no intention of using them themselves. In fact, they’re buying them and then reselling them on Ebay for, literally, $1000.
I don’t understand it, really. As much as I hate hippies, for some reason I thought they’d have their act together when selling tickets and making sure that people who were actually wanting to attend got tickets. This blog that I’ve never heard of that covers local Denver news makes a good point. Nine Inch Nails makes a pretty decent effort to protect their fans from getting deprived of tickets because of some douchebag who got lucky in the Ticketmaster queue. Every time something weird comes up in the music industry, I see Trent Reznor and NIN doing something revolutionary. And as much as I can’t stand their music, at least they’re cracking down on people who are just buying tickets to resell and scam other people.
Anyway, like I said, I always had some respect for hippies because for some reason I associated them a bit with punk rock’s DIY ethic. But what I’ve suddenly hit upon is that hippies are sort of like AIG-style capitalists, whereas a lot of punk is more like DIY capitalism, with its ability to sell hundreds of thousands of cassettes and CDs without signing to a major label or selling merchandise. You get the feeling that it suddenly makes sense why Ann Coulter is a Dead Head.
Yeah, yeah, sweeping generalizations suck. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel like Phish are sort of like “sellouts” for some reason, despite my hatred of the word. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but this whole ridiculous ticket situation with Phish is just such a joke.
